JackFrost wrote:It's usually to mark the h aspiré, which prevents elision and liaison.

En parlant de cela...

Je venais de me perdre dans Wikipedia en suivant l'odeur de "-t-". Je decouvrais qu'il s'appelle un "phonème éphelcystique". (An ephelcystic phoneme, it says, is one of the methods of resolving the Hiatus caused by the two vowels facing each other. In terms of Liaison, the "t" bridges the two vowels just like pronouncing the otherwise-unpronounced end of les in les‿amis. However, it being an ephelcystic phoneme just means that its appearance is for etymological reasons. In this case, I think I remember reading that it was because the evolution from Vulgar Latin (plus a dash of Germanic) to Modern French both changed spellings and gained a preference for not pronouncing final sounds. Fascinating.) (J'aussi venais d'apprendre "venir + de + infinitif". Ha.)

I was looking down the list of words starting with an aspirated H and noticed haie there. I remembered that word from a reading we did in my high school French class more than 10 years ago. The line was, Caché derrière la haie [...]. (Turns out it's from Le Loup by Marcel Aymé.)

And now, after all that, all of a sudden I can hear it being read as I couldn't before. And now, I don't have a question to ask anymore. Zut.

Well, on the way here, I learned about:

venir + de + l'infinitif

The diaeresis (le tréma) individuates vowel sounds. (haie vs. haïe)

When the passé composé is formed with avoir, but the direct object precedes the verb, the participe passé has to agree with the direct object. (Je l'ai haïe. "I hated her/it(f)." vs. Je l'ai haï. "I hated him/it(m)."

Forming the liaison from words ending in -_n, where _ is a nasalized vowel, in all but a few cases, is apparently supposed to cause the vowel to be denasalized. That's quite a detail.

de is used on the infinitive in an impersonal expression with a dummy subject, but à is used for a real subject.

It surprised me a bit hearing that from a French when all the long, I thought it would be exclusively a Quebecois thing to say. o.o

The diaeresis (le tréma) individuates vowel sounds. (haie vs. haïe)

The other accent marks can do that too. Examples: Noémie [nɔemi], géographie [ʒeɔgʀafi], etc. Although watch out for a handful of exceptions like poêle [pwal ~ pwɛ(:)l]. :p

When the passé composé is formed with avoir, but the direct object precedes the verb, the participe passé has to agree with the direct object. (Je l'ai haïe. "I hated her/it(f)." vs. Je l'ai haï. "I hated him/it(m)."

Not always. For example, it's really common to use ce/ça as dummy subject as well, so you'd hear both "c'est impossible de" and "il est impossible de" having the same meaning. The former is more general, everyday French whereas the latter is more formal used in the media register and above.

And it's "continuer à" indeed. Usually, it's "de" that links the verb with the rest of the sentence, but some verbs have a fixed preposition attached to them and "à" would be another common one. For example, "continuer à", "obliger qqn à faire qqch", "commencer à", etc. and "se souvenir de", "se demander de", "forcer qqn de faire qqch", "continuer de", etc. Then we have other prepositions being used like "finir par" and "demander sur". And so on.

So, we have both "continuer de" and "continuer à" with the same meaning, so it's up to decide which to use. Personally, I see "à" being used the most often. I wouldn't worry too much about this case.

J'ai appris l'anglais à l'école, j'ai fait un stage en Angleterre, et je vis à Paris où je communique avec les touristes, donc je me débrouille. I went out with girls from US, Australia, so I think I can cope. If you feel like learning french with me I could help you.